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CRITICALSTART vs Fidelis Elevate comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 3, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

CRITICALSTART
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
33rd
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Security Orchestration Automation and Response (SOAR) (28th)
Fidelis Elevate
Ranking in Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
24th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) (32nd), Threat Deception Platforms (6th), SSL/TLS Decryption (2nd), Network Detection and Response (NDR) (13th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) category, the mindshare of CRITICALSTART is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Fidelis Elevate is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
 

Featured Reviews

PB
Saves my team time and alert fatigue, allowing us to concentrate on more important things
The Trusted Behavior Registry helps resolve alerts in the sense that CRITICALSTART is doing a lot of that initial triage for me. Out of a given 500,000 events and alerts, for example, that come through, they're taking out 495,000 of them. That only leaves me with a subset of that to actually have to triage, and that's where it benefits us. They take care of Tier-1 and Tier-2 triage. And the new mobile app is awesome. It is one of the best I've ever seen. It's much better than its predecessor. It's more intuitive, a whole lot easier to navigate and get where you need to go. It's less repetitive and just generally easier to use. It allows me to not have to be sitting at my computer all the time. I can be on my phone or tablet or wherever I'm at. It makes it a lot easier to answer tickets and do that kind of thing. Also, the intuitiveness of the updated user interface for the service is spot-on. It is much easier to navigate, and know where to navigate, in the newer interface. I've never had an issue with responsiveness. It's very quick and doesn't sit there and chug on anything. It's fast, it's efficient. It has enabled our SecOps team to take action faster because if you have multiple ways of connecting to it and actually getting your alerts answered and taking care of things fast, it is extremely helpful. All the information that you need to make a determination is usually in the alert itself that comes through the Zero-Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP). I don't find myself going back to the app itself very often. That still happens, but not as often. The ability to flow the information forward, from the alert standpoint, helps me because it saves me from running back to get the information. It's improved my efficiency. Finally, there haven't been any data sources that the service wasn't able to integrate with.
Mostafa Ameen - PeerSpot reviewer
Advanced threat detection capabilities with comprehensive incident response features providing robust cybersecurity for organizations
The initial aspect concerns two engines. The first one mentioned is available for searching behaviors directly. The second engine involves the Google Ade tool, which operates on the machine. The challenge arises when attempting to rectify protection rules, causing confusion. It would be beneficial to enhance Rigixs Query. I encounter difficulty removing certain entries in behavior or alerts; likewise, I am unable to add specific calls.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The quick interaction between the agents is the most valuable feature. If we have questions, they're quick to answer. If we make a change to our system, they quickly make the changes that are necessary to filter the logs correctly."
"The main difference between the other options and this one is the quality of the personnel within the SOC. It's their knowledge and depth and the way they handle customers."
"There is a team of people who monitor our traffic and processes 24/7, so if anything raises a flag or alert, it will escalate back to me right away. That's the most incredible part: Humans working behind the scenes 24/7 to monitor our networks."
"Their Zero Trust Analytics Platform (ZTAP) engine, which is kind of their correlation engine, is by far and away one of the best in the business. We can filter and utilize different lists to build out different alerts, such as, what to alert on and when not to alert. This engine helps reduce our number of alerts and false positives."
"From where we were prior to going into them, the service has increased our analysts’ efficiency to the point that they can focus on other areas of the business. It gives me the ability to allow analysts to do Level 3 and 4 work and stay out of the weeds of the alerts, where you tend to get alert fatigue. The service takes care of much of the Tier 1 and Tier 2 triage. It is more effective than what we had been used to, because it allows the filtering of Level 1 and Level 2 type alerts to be taken care of. This leaves less for us to handle, which is a good thing."
"There are two parts of CRITICALSTART's services that are most valuable to us. The MDR solution where they monitor our computers, laptops, and users across the board; and their knowledge of Palo Alto firewalls."
"Outside of using the platform to manage alerts, the feature of the service that we get the most value from is being able to reach out to them and say, "Hey, we might go buy a SIEM," for example. They give us their overview of what's out there, what they've dealt with, what they integrate with, and what that looks like. That's been pretty powerful over the years for us."
"My impression of the transparency of the data is that it has good detail. It allows you to see how many events have come in, how many of those events have made it down to their analysts to review, and then however many from their analysts to be able to close out, have been able to been escalated to us. It's a good metric that we can share with my management. They see the value of what the SOC is bringing on top of what my team is already doing."
"After rack and stack, devices were up and running base configurations within two hours. As with any IPS, tuning is required to stop false positives. This is no different, but the ease of use of the interface allowed my team to start making adjustments within a few hours."
"It ensures the stability of network behavior across various aspects of our network and offers responsive capabilities to address incidents promptly"
"Reporting is great, it is easy to do a quick search through 45 days of data for something of interest."
"The solution's technical support is perfect, so I rate the technical support a ten out of ten"
"There are many valuable features. The NDR gives very good network visibility, and the endpoint module has a great feature called "Live Connect" for remote connections. They also have "Tasks" that can be run on endpoints to gather specific information or retrieve logs."
"What I like the most about this solution is the complexity. It covers a lot of areas, unlike other solutions."
"It has a rating system now so you can rate things up or down, depending on your environment. This means alerting can be customized, yet still pick up anomalies."
"Compared to similar solutions, it's quite scalable. You just need to add more storage to scale-up."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement with the new UI, and that's about it. I would like to see a more intuitive design."
"The updated UI is actually pretty bad. Regarding the intuitiveness, it is fairly easy to use, but the responsiveness, on a scale of one to 10, is a one. It's really poor performance."
"They just did a user interface overhaul to the website portal that you use for troubleshooting tickets. The old one was fine. The new one is not intuitive..."
"It has frustrated us that they don't have a native Slack integration, because most things do now. That's something we've asked for, for years, and it just doesn't really seem like it's a priority."
"During the six-month integration and rollout, there were some bumpy roads along the way. There were communication breakdowns between the project manager, CRITICALSTART leadership, and us (as the customer). I expressed my displeasure during the integration in their inability to effectively communicate when there were holdups or issues. They were going through some growing pains at that time, but they have been right there for us ever since."
"The UI has become slower but it's not something I would call them out on."
"In terms of responsiveness, when I open up an alert, sometimes it takes a bit of time to load. However, it only happened once or twice."
"They could dig a little bit deeper into the Splunk alerts when they feel like they need to be escalated to us. For example, if a locked account shows up, they could do a little extra digging to verify that the locked account was due to a bad password on the local system. They could just do a little extra digging within the Splunk environment instead of pushing it onto us to go do that extra little digging."
"I encounter difficulty removing certain entries in behavior or alerts; likewise, I am unable to add specific calls."
"The reports in the endpoint area of Elevate can be improved."
"There is room for improvement in email security. It's a security issue. If you're aiming for XDR, covering the entire threat landscape is crucial."
"Configuration, in terms of building the collector and communicating with endpoints, is complex."
"We position the solution as an antivirus, but this part of the solution needs improvement. They need to generally enhance the features that they have, rather than adding anything new."
"Fidelis Endpoint is an expensive product making it one of its shortcomings that needs improvement."
"The interface bug needs to be squashed once and for all. This has been the predominant issue with an otherwise stellar product. It reboots itself unscheduled, about once a month, due to a memory buffer flaw in the interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing has always been competitive. They have always been good to us. They will make it a fight. They don't try to hide anything; it's always been fully transparent and well-worth what we pay for it."
"The pricing of other services was so insane that they weren't even an option."
"There are contractual penalties if their SLAs are not met. This commitment was very important in our decision to go with this service, because not having downtime is extremely important to us. The providers has not missed an SLA in the 18 months that I have worked with them."
"It costs a lot for what we felt comfortable to spend."
"I've told CRITICALSTART that I think the managed service they provide is cheaper than it should be. It's a really good deal."
"Overall, for what I'm paying for it, and the benefit I'm getting out of it, it is right where it needs to be, if not a little bit in my favor. For what it costs me to actually have this service, I could afford one internal person to do that job, but now I have a team of 10 or more who are doing that job, and they don't sleep because they work shifts."
"As far as the expense goes, it's very competitive pricing and the services you get are almost like you have a person on your team."
"You license by the number of days of logs you need to maintain visibility for. Forty-five days is a good solid number for a company with around a 10k user base."
"Fidelis Endpoint is an expensive product. My company makes yearly payments toward the licensing cost of the solution."
"It's quite expensive but we can customize it to reduce the price."
"It's somehow expensive. From one to ten, I would rate it a five. They need to improve the prices. It's very high."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Real Estate/Law Firm
12%
Healthcare Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Retailer
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about Fidelis Elevate?
It ensures the stability of network behavior across various aspects of our network and offers responsive capabilities to address incidents promptly
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fidelis Elevate?
It's somehow expensive. From one to ten, I would rate it a five. They need to improve the prices. It's very high. We lose customers for price. It's not always worth it for them. Even for enterprise...
What needs improvement with Fidelis Elevate?
The initial aspect concerns two engines. The first one mentioned is available for searching behaviors directly. The second engine involves the Google Ade tool, which operates on the machine. The ch...
 

Also Known As

Critical Start, CriticalStart
Fidelis Elevate Platform, Fidelis Enterprise, Fidelis Cloud, Fidelis Managed Detection and Response, Fidelis Deception, Fidelis Decryption, Fidelis Endpoint, Fidelis Network
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
First Midwest Bank
Find out what your peers are saying about CRITICALSTART vs. Fidelis Elevate and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,703 professionals have used our research since 2012.